With his grandfather’s funeral card stuffed inside his helmet, Jim Shea Jr. rocketed down the icy chute and soon landed in his father’s arms.
As the newest gold-medal winner hugged his dad, 1964 Olympian Jim Shea Sr., the two men whispered only of a past Olympian, Jack Shea, killed three weeks earlier in a car accident.
“It would have been great if Grandpa saw this,” Jim Sr. said into his son’s ear.
“He did,” Jim Jr. responded. “He was with me.”
Jim Shea Jr.’s headfirst, 80 mph sled ride at the 2002 Salt Lake Games stirred tears and, for a day, boosted the backwoods sport of skeleton to the top of the Olympic mountain.
Four years later, can anyone blame Shea for his rage? Sex and drugs have transformed his old team from fierce to farce, from medal lock to laughingstock.
“I worked very hard for the reputation of this sport. My family has worked very hard,” Shea said. “It’s a shame. It’s embarrassing.”
Start with U.S. skeleton coach Tim Nardiello. He was blocked from accompanying his team to Italy after two female athletes accused him of dirty talk on the track – and he admitted to romancing a rival athlete from New Zealand.
Then there’s Zach Lund, a gold-medal favorite, who was suspended from the World Cup tour after testing positive for finasteride, a hair-growth drug he said he has been using since 1999. Finasteride also can mask steroid use. But the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency believed Lund when he said he wasn’t pumping up, just primping up.
USADA decided to let Lund off with a warning. But his teammates haven’t missed the opportunity to rub it in.
“It’s unfortunate for Zach that he has to admit he’s going bald and that I can out-lift him to prove that he’s not on steroids,” said Katie Uhlaender, the lone female U.S. slider competing in Italy. “There’s no doubt he’s not on steroids. I can out-squat and out-power clean the man. If he’s on steroids, they’re not working.”
The skeleton team’s dark karma seemed to erupt in October when Uhlaender’s teammate, Noelle Pikus-Pace, was victimized by a runaway bobsled at the Calgary Olympic track. After a training run, the four-man U.S. bobsled blew through the finish line, roared up an incline and skidded onto an asphalt road 50 feet past the track. There, the U.S. skeleton team stood. The bobsled slammed into Pikus-Pace, shattering her sled and splintering her leg. Once a gold-medal hopeful, she will go to Turin only as an American alternate.
Make no bones about it: U.S. Skeleton is looking a little haggard two weeks before the Olympics. The Nardiello fiasco still has the team reeling – and Shea seething. He supports the coach.
The sexual harassment allegations became public in December. Skeleton athlete Felicia Canfield wrote the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation alleging the coach tried to kiss her, touch her inappropriately and made sexual comments. A second complaint, from the mother of 2002 gold medalist Tristan Gale, also alleged Nardiello made inappropriate comments.
Neither Canfield nor Gale won a spot on the 2006 Olympic team.
“I can’t believe anybody is not seeing through this. You didn’t make the team so you make a complaint? Hey, I didn’t make the team,” said Shea, 37. “But I’m old and I’m slow and that’s the way it is.
“I’m very disappointed in the (two) athletes who initiated this. To wait right before the Olympics – this is a witch hunt. You have a team that wants this coach, and that’s the bottom line.”
But last week, the U.S. Olympic Committee decided not to let Nardiello coach in Turin after its internal investigation found he failed to exercise appropriate judgment, and had violated ethical codes and the USOC Code of Conduct.
That ruling shocked some skeleton athletes because an arbitrator had days earlier found no evidence to support claims Nardiello sexually harassed the two team members, and the sport’s national governing body had reinstated him.
The arbitrator, Shea said, “saw how (Nardiello) is dealing with eccentric, high-strung athletes doing a crazy sport. It’s a difficult job. He found Nardiello innocent and that should be what matters.”
The fallout seems to be showing up on the track.
At a World Cup race in Germany on Thursday, no American women broke the top 10, the worst showing this season for Team USA.
But Uhlaender, who finished 12th, said the turmoil may ultimately pull the team together. In a phone interview from Germany, she predicted, “We’re going to get settled and everything is going to be fine.”
Regaining focus, said the Breckenridge resident, is the task at hand.
“I don’t feel like we have a choice. I mean, we have to do that in order to perform. It would be totally detrimental to focus on the politics,” Uhlaender said.
But Shea is worried – about the skeleton team’s ability to perform in Italy without its head coach and about the once-shining program’s health in years to come. (His father, Jim Shea Sr., president of the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation, was traveling last week and unavailable for comment.)
“The association has spent $200,000 on lawyer bills during this whole thing. That’s about 40 percent of the budget,” Shea Jr. said. “So next year the team is (in trouble). The athletes will starve.”
Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
